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Shorter days and earlier evenings fill me with a sense of coziness. It’s the time of the year that spending more time in the kitchen and gathering around the table with friends and family is pure, simple joy. Life slows down, conversations linger, and warmth envelopes the soul.

When I married Kevin 22 year ago, I knew little to nothing about cooking. It wasn’t something I enjoyed and when you tasted a meal I prepared, you could tell. But I slowly began to fall in love with spending time in the kitchen. Eventually, the kitchen transformed from a space that represented work, cleaning, and chores to a sense of family, gathering, and love. With that transformation I also began to love the process of preparing a meal. To take some time in the evening to carefully prepare fresh produce and transform it into a tasty and nourishing meal, all while having gentle conversation with my family, gave me a sense of accomplishment and drew our family closer together.

While cooking may never be your thing, I’d highly recommend taking time to prepare at least one home-cooked meal a week and enjoying it around your table with the ones you love. Homes are our haven. They are places that should refresh and draw us closer together. The kitchen in my home has done that for me and it’s now one of my favorite places to be.

Now that I love cooking, I have also become aware of how important it is to use fresh, local, and seasonal ingredients. This not only makes the food we eat more tasty, but it also helps to support our local farmers and community. A easy and fun way to do this is to join a CSA (community supported agriculture). When you join one, you are essentially buying a farm share from a local farm or a group of farmers. This helps the farmers to have operating capital and in return, you get a delivery of the freshest produce (and sometimes meat, dairy, and more) delivered to your doorstep.

So, how does a CSA work?

In this area, there are a variety of CSA’s that can cater to your needs. Typically, you pay in advance of the growing season so farmers have operating capital. During the growing season, members receive a box of produce from the CSA on a regular schedule (usually once per week). Some CSA shares are delivered directly to your home, and others must be picked up from a designated location during a set time frame. Some CSAs only offer produce, while others you may also have the option of purchasing a share that includes eggs, meat, dairy, baked goods, fresh flowers, or other farm products. Most CSA’s have pre-selected items that go in the box—produce that is in season and just picked—while others allow you to pick and choose what’s in your box.

I have been a member of Full Circle Farms CSA for a number of years. You can pay weekly for your upcoming share and you can get meat, dairy, baked goods, and a number of other products in your weekly delivery. You can also change the produce selection each week if you aren’t fond of the current selection. Since it’s so flexible, this works really well for me but it’s equally fun to support the smaller farms and receive surprise ingredients that add to your cooking repertoire!

No two farms do CSA the same way so it’s great to shop around for one that you feel good about supporting and works for your family. To help find the right program for you, we have put a list together of some of the local CSA’s to select from. I hope you find this helpful and that it sparks your interest to consider joining a CSA, too! Remember, you’ll be supporting our local community and the hard-working farmers that are vested in it. Isn’t that worth consideration?